Midtopia

Midtopia

Friday, April 06, 2007

No Saddam-Al Qaeda link

So says the Defense Department. Dick Cheney, naturally, refuses to believe it.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Cheney really needs to come out of his bunker once in a while. He's become such a caricature that he's not even worth a detailed rebuttal anymore.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ya gotta love it. i read a post on sat. that called rush out he was doing the saddam sept 11 connection last week..... they don't get it

check it out

http://joeleonardi.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/the-taunts-of-a-coward/

Anonymous said...

The Dem spin machine never ceases to amaze me! Nowhere in that information does anything match your biased headline: No Iraq-Al Qaeda Link. What it DOES say is this....."Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda.." That's okay....because INDIRECTLY is good enough for me and others. And it was the INDIRECT link that we were worried about.

The report also said...there were "few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups." Two things about that statement: 1) "few substantiated contacts" means there WERE some. And last time I looked up the word "few" it is "more than one." AND 2) Just because it 'lacked evidence' of a long term relationship, does not mean there wasn't one. Former Pres. Bill Clinton sure believed there was one when he stated so in the 1998 indictment of bin Laden.

JP5